


True Minds

by melforbes



Category: The X-Files
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-12 00:18:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12947187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melforbes/pseuds/melforbes
Summary: I know nothing about neurosurgery.





	True Minds

He got the call around six, right when her shift was supposed to end, and as he leaned away from the couch and toward the coffee-table, his phone's current resting place, he felt his muscles cringe, age and use and hundreds of other factors coming together for one certain cacophony called _sore._  For Christmas last year, she'd bought them matching Fitbits, some two-for-one deal and a concern for the health of his stay-at-home heart making the purchase worthwhile, and though he'd stayed within the same half-mile radius all day, he still had the ten-thousand steps he needed for the day, all from gardening and chopping wood and doing the laundry. In the fridge, he had the world's freshest broccoli rabe stewing, all set for lunch tomorrow.

"Hey," he said, the caller obvious even though he never checked. "If you're calling because you saw that I haven't taken a step in two hours and are concerned for my wellbeing, know that it's because-"

"Can we cancel tonight?"

 _Tonight,_  he thought, the word heavy in his mind. To embrace the last bit of life without snow, he'd asked her to dinner at a New Wave place in Alexandria, the brick restaurant softly lit and overlooking the river, lavender lemonade offered as a seasonal drink, each plate costing a hundred dollars or more. Yesterday, he'd taken his best sport-coat out of the attic and had been shocked to find that it still fit; to work this morning, she'd taken a dress-bag, and his one little peek inside had told him that the garment was made of navy-colored velvet. He loved the way she looked in navy, how her skin was so creamy and her eyes infinitely bright.

"I guess so," he conceded, knowing she wouldn't say such a thing for no good reason.

"There's..."

She paused, took a breath.

"I'd like to see something," she gave. "In the city."

"Are you asking me to go with you?"

She paused again.

"Yes," she gave, emphasis on the fricative, "but I'm not sure it's something you'd like to see."

"Is the ballet in town?" he half-joked.

"Meet me at the hospital as soon as you can?"

Uncomfortably, he paused.

"Are you-"

"I'm fine, I'm fine," she hurried through. "Emergency bay, alright? I'll meet you there."

He knew she was about to hang up, had memorized the cadence of their every phone call, so he tried to hold her back with a soft, "Scully?"

Caught off-guard, she hummed a response, to which he said, "I love you."

"Love you too," she gave in a rush, and then, the line clicked off.

Out of assumption, he left on his current sweaty jeans and put a flannel over his tee-shirt - the nights had grown chilly in their late-autumn stupor - and the pickup he'd bought off of their neighbors for a thin wad of fifties and a promise to keep the old lad in good shape wasn't intended for such travel, but he took it into the city anyway, managed to find her little sedan in the hospital's achy parking garage, the concrete stark and uncomfortable. _Why not give it a little bit of color?_  he wondered while fretting over how the doors of the pickup couldn't lock anymore, its age all too apparent in such tiny ways. _After all,_  he thought, _rarely anyone comes to a hospital for a good reason. If the last thing I'm going to see before I have an operation is a concrete garage filled with mediocre patient-owned cars and Porsches for the doctors, then I'll never survive treatment. Those going to the place of their death deserve a painted flower or two._

But he didn't comment as he came into the elevator, as he followed the signs for _emergency._  On that Friday night, the place was predictably packed, drunks and the elderly and young people who should know better moving in and out of waiting rooms while hoping that, for once, their cases would be the most dire and therefore the most worth tending to. From behind, he spotted her, a low little bun of red hair resting on the back of her neck, her pale blue scrubs and white sneakers making her look the stereotype. When she turned around to face him, she smiled briefly but let her look return to business.

In her arms were a pair of scrubs topped with a badge, a doctor's badge, some _Christopher Brown_  who, despite the blue-eyed resemblance, looked nothing like Mulder himself.

"Put all of this on," she said, forcing the clothes into his arms. "The bathroom's to the right."

And because she'd done the same for him at worse hours, he went into the bathroom and changed, put on the awkwardly-fitting clothes, donned the badge despite his confusion. _She's sneaking me in,_  he thought, _but I haven't the damnedest clue as to why._

When he returned to her, she took his piled flannel and jeans and led him toward an elevator, where she pressed for the level of the locker room she used.

"We have to make this quick," she said, leaning against the back wall.

"Why?" he asked.

Looking up, she met his eyes for the first time since he'd arrived, and in her visage, he saw haggard tiredness, an achy feeling that she had whenever she came home from work, twenty-thousand steps already on her Fitbit. Furthermore, he saw silent awe, an indescribable excitement and anxiety, the look of someone who'd been faced with an opportunity so pure to them that the sheer idea of passing it up was unfathomable.

Softly, she turned her gaze down, and he wondered if she'd had enough to drink today, eaten recently. He'd been too nervous to eat lunch, then too annoyed with himself for being at all nervous that he couldn't bring himself to force a meal.

"A young woman - a student, very intelligent," Scully began, "came into the emergency room this morning with a headache and a multitude of sudden-onset symptoms, none too optimistic. After an M.R.I., her doctor was able to clearly see a large tumor in her brain. The primary treatment option is surgery, but the tumor happens to be in a spot that's challenging to operate on and close to many important parts of the brain, so she was shied away from surgery. However, she chose to go through with it instead, prolonging her life but possibly leaving her disabled and highly dependent."

Gingerly, he nodded but still held askance in his eyes. She swallowed, took a breath, gave, "I've never seen an operation like this before, and I didn't want to let the opportunity go."

The elevator hooked to a stop, and she led him out and toward her locker, a place he knew all too well from when he would occasionally bring by her forgotten lunchbag or pick her up from work so that her coworkers could see that, yes, she did have a life, and yes, that boyfriend of hers wasn't made-up, and yes, he was just as handsome as one ought to believe. Though they weren't a pair interested in public displays, he still liked flaunting her just a little bit, showing the world _she's brilliant, she's beautiful, and she makes the worst cup of coffee you'll ever have, and the sheer fact that I can hold her hand in front of all of you remains one of the greatest mysteries of the universe. And, believe me, I know a thing or two about the mysteries of the universe._

Her locker combination was her birthday, and as she shoved his clothes on top of her purse and - largely uneaten, he noted - lunch, as she pushed away the dress-bag, the contents of his pockets clattered to the bottom, his car keys and wallet making a scene among her things. _Shit,_  he thought as she slammed the locker shut, locked it up again. _Did she see it? Was it even in my pocket?_  As she pulled him out of the locker room and into the elevator again, he breathed a sigh of relief; no, it was in his sport-jacket, all ready for the evening they'd intended to have so that he knew he wouldn't forget it.

"You know," he said as she pressed for a different floor, tapped her foot in impatience, "I've never actually watched a surgery before."

"You haven't eaten, right?"

"I haven't."

"Then you'll be fine."

"Scully, I..." he trailed off, shaking his head. "I can wait for you elsewhere. I really don't mind the cancellation. If it's something you want to see, then I want you to see it. You don't have to feel obliged to take me along."

At that, she furrowed her brow uncomfortably, her lips pursed in that tired pout he'd gotten to know so well. In the silence between them, he could hear her words: _how long will it take you to realize that I want you to be there?_

Once they'd managed to bypass the mild security surrounding the operating rooms, a knot in his throat as he tried to become Christopher Brown, the admittance was stark, commonplace, just close enough to the _E.R._  reruns he watched while bored at home; though neither of them would be permitted to touch the patient, they still washed their hands in the deep sinks together nonetheless, his eyes meticulously following her silent teaching as she scrubbed all the way to her elbow, her dainty fingers gripping at her tired skin; she'd painted her nails for tonight, a beautiful pale pink that would've gone unnoticed if she hadn't shown him how to scrub at each of this fingers. As the scrub-nurses dressed them before the still-awake patient, he felt obliged to tip someone, to slip a five into anyone's pocket for simply permitting him to be there.

"All set, Doctor Brown," his scrub-nurse said, and suddenly, he realized the intelligence of the scam; with a surgical mask over his face, protective goggles over his eyes, and a disposal scrub-cap covering his hair, he could be the elusive Doctor Brown, just a pair of blue eyes knowing all things medical. Looking down at Scully, he met her gaze with comfortable understanding; she'd executed this far better than he figured anyone could.

The suite was just cold enough to be uncomfortable, and in front of a group of surgeons, a woman sat facing away from them, her body supported in an awkward half-horizontal fashion, halos stabilizing her head and making her seem slightly cyborg. As he followed Scully forward, toward where everything would take place, his steps grew heavy, uncomfortable; he was an outsider, a fluke, and he hadn't a clue as to how he would react to watching a living person being opened up in front of him. Back when he had watched Scully perform autopsies, they'd had the benefit of a dead - usually - patient and no life-forces to focus on, so when he'd occasionally used the nearby sinks as vomit receptacles, they hadn't had to worry about much contamination. He figured that puking on the floor in front of a woman whose brain was exposed to the world wouldn't be good for the hospital's public relations or the patient's health

Mulder and Scully were forced by real doctors with real identities to stand back and out of the way, right next to a little pack of medical students in color-coded scrubs, a shade different from that of all of the real doctors - and Mulder - in the room. From television and from his own experiences, Mulder assumed the operating suite to be tense, agonizing, inhumane, but as anesthetics began their routine, he found that the humanity in the room became shockingly apparent.

"So," the leading neurosurgeon asked the woman whose shaven head anticipated the strange pain and numbness - and possible disability - that was to come, "what are you studying at G.W.?"

And, to Mulder's shock, the woman spoke, and she spoke eloquently, long words with many syllables slipping from her lips while her balding head was numbed. His gloved hands shaking, Mulder listened to the woman as she recounted a story of studying abroad in Mozambique, a scalpel peeling apart her skin as she spoke. Surely enough, there was the skullcap, the meninges soon to be exposed, all things that Scully whispered to him under her breath while the surgeons listened to the patient quote Rilke for reasons Mulder was too dumbfounded to follow. In the end, they only interrupted her to warn of the sounds - and, unfortunately, smells - of the bone saw.

The skullcap was peeled away; the bone was abandoned for the moment, soon to be replaced; this woman's head was open, and she asked them where the best takeout places near the hospital were.

"I mean, I didn't say this," she gave with a tense laugh, the meticulous halos keeping her in place stifling her movement, "but my boyfriend was in the hospital last year, wicked mono, and when he got sick of hospital food, I went to the Indian place that all of the residents recommended and brought him back chana masala even though he wasn't supposed to eat it. Not creamed chicken, right? It made his day. Anyway, he told me to ask."

"There's an all-night sushi place down the street," Scully supplied, breaking her professional silence. "Makes for a good after-hours date."

Then, she glanced to Mulder, and in turn, he nodded ever-so-slightly, afraid that his one movement could destroy the woman whose brain was full exposed to them's life.

The surgeon picked up a scalpel, the blade shimmering in front of the pulsating, complex mass of her brain, the tumor just visible in its conspicuous way, all white and inhuman in comparison to the vivacious organ to which it clung. As he brought the blade closer and closer to the woman's brain, Mulder felt his breath catch, the surgeon's steady hands both infallible and alarmingly helpless. Going into this surgery, they all knew the outcome: either she loses high functionality, or she doesn't, and that depended equally on the surgeon's near-superhuman competence and the simple makeup of her physical form. Scully hadn't needed to give him statistics to show him this woman's odds.

"We'll need you to keep talking as we go, alright?" the surgeon gave.

"Well," the woman said, "I guess I'll have to bring out high school stories, then."

A collision, the blade touching the tumor and not eliciting a response because there are no pain receptors in the brain. The woman spoke of her prom dress, gold and shimmering and costing almost as much as his ancient truck had while the surgeon's steady hands guided the blade in a most basic way: get the bad stuff out, and keep the good stuff in. In college, Mulder had been forced into a biology class - bachelor's of science requirement, of course - and as he'd stared down the fetal pig he'd been forced to dissect, its unborn paws tied with string to the sides of a dissection plate, a kitchen knife in his hand because the professors didn't want first-year students using scalpels, and after more deep breaths than he could count, he'd plunged the knife ever-so-slightly into the pig's chest, making the cuts his professors had instructed him to make. However, the knife had been dull and improper, so he'd had to find leverage on the lab-bench, to adjust his protective goggles in order to see better, to tug and tug as the kitchen knife refused to pull through the skin. Finally, once the cuts had been made, he'd opened the pig up, had been taken aback with how every bodily system they'd learned about really was within this pig. With alarming fascination, he'd pulled at the thymus gland, the little lungs, the heart that was just barely larger than his thumb. Individually, he'd cut out the intestines, the stomach, the pancreas, the uterus, and as he'd inspected each one, surprisingly able to label each tiny subsection of the body, he'd visualized those things with himself, his stomach empty at the time because he'd known better, his heart pumping faster than it would've had he been in a psychology lecture instead. Finally, he'd cut open the stomach to find that there was a large tumor obstructing the digestive tract. His pig, had it been born, would never have survived.

The surgeon in front of them delicately moved the scalpel around the tumor, the room silent save for the woman's babbling and the occasional and awed conversational response. At his side, Scully reached for his gloved hand, held theirs together behind their close bodies so that no one else would notice.

After a while, the brain ahead of them became normal, just a part of the room, a pulsating piece of humanity that was supposed to be there. In fact, each one of them had a brain in their own heads, and so did everyone else in the hospital, and so did many other animals, and some animals - or any other kind of creature, he was iffy on the nomenclature - had adaptive forms of _something_  that could be compared to a brain. Some animals - or insects, maybe - had bodies with circulatory systems that bathed every organ in blood. In humans, he thought, that would be an ugly, inefficient, bloated mess.

Ahead of them, the surgeon slowed, coming to that integral part of the tumor, breathing through a soft prayer. God couldn't save anyone in the operating suite, but it didn't hurt to ask.

"This is it, right?" the woman hesitantly gave, her stories of Chris, The Senior Year Drama Queen, fading away.

"Yes," the surgeon said calmly.

"Do I need to keep talking?" she asked.

"Yes, most definitely," the surgeon said.

She paused. Scully's hand pulled tighter to his.

"I had to memorize _Ulysses_  for a class," the woman gave, then began to speak.

A slow, soft, measured movement of the scalpel, and the dance continued, Scully's hand trembling in his. There were reasons why they stood in the background while neurosurgeons worked, why the nervous didn't approach the horrifying and magnificent organ before them. When he thought of the moments ahead, of the woman reciting words that he couldn't comprehend but still felt enter through him osmotically, steadily becoming more and more a part of him as time went on, he thought of death, of demise, of how neurologists would, in emergency situations, deem a patient able to go on living even if the patient's heart continued to beat. As a boy, he'd known a classmate whose brother had died in a motorcycle accident, and once that classmate had become Mulder's friend, he'd confided that his brother hadn't died from his injuries, not immediately, but had been comatose, unawake, kept alive by machines that, depending on one's definition, may not have technically qualified him as _alive._  In the end, the parents had had to make the call given what the neurologists were telling them: either their son's brain would miraculously still function enough that he could possibly live a severely disabled - and likely short - life, or their son could be removed from life support, the rest of his time on earth up to God. Though Mulder understood the stark contrast between the two, he felt a certain cosmic illegality within the options, for based on how he perceived other people, their humanity outweighing their physical bodies, he didn't think one human should ever choose whether or not someone else lives or dies based solely on their body's functions. Who really decided what the most humane way was when only humans held a concept of humanity?

Uncomfortably, Scully took a deep breath softly enough that only Mulder could hear.

_I am a part of all that I have met;_

_Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'_

_Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades_

_For ever and forever when I move._

Looking over at Scully, he saw soft tears forming beneath her protective glasses, her cheeks stained, but nonetheless, her gaze was fixed on the sight ahead of them, the mystical and surprisingly ethereal operation that could drastically change one woman's fate. Normally, when doctors flubbed, the patient received some kind of compensation, but how could this woman ever receive such a thing? They weren't leaving a towel beneath her sutures by accident; they were cutting into her brain, hardly able to save her either way. When did ethics outweigh practices? When would the surgeon chose to say no?

He gripped Scully's hand tightly in acknowledgement. Suddenly, despite every strange and beautiful thing in the room, he found he could smell the last spot of perfume on her neck, homey and familiar.

_Push off, and sitting well in order smite_

_The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds_

_To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths_

_Of all the western stars, until I die._

_It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:_

_It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles._

The woman stopped, a comma turning to a period. Though Mulder couldn't bring himself to watch, he heard the tumor - or, rather, whatever of it they could manage to extract - flop onto a petri dish with so little grace that the air in the room went stale, dizziness coming to Mulder's forehead, fate and life and liberty and love hanging over him. He had no right to bear witness to this. In Scully's world, the words stopped, but in his, the woman finished the poem.

Her name was Kimberly.

"Kimberly?" the surgeon asked, nurses congregating in front of her; maybe she knew the gravity of the moment and had stopped for that purpose, or so they all wanted to think, breaths held, selves filling with fear. With an uncomfortable swallow, Mulder wished they could've said something, given her an opportunity for more personable last words.

Glancing to Scully, he saw her with her eyes closed, tears catching in her lashes, a silent prayer on her lips.

The woman ahead of them took a deep breath, and after sighing that breath out, she finished the poem, surgeons working their way out of her mind, her voice carrying over while waves of relief hit the hospital staff - and Mulder - and with the final sutures being placed, the observers could leave, the so-called _fun_ part over, so behind a gaggle of excited medical students, he led Scully on, could feel without looking at her just how shaken and overwhelmed she was.

Scrub in, scrub out, he didn't know the mechanics but managed to watch her muscle-memory movements and copy them, so eventually, they were beyond the operating suite, disposables disposed of, identification cards and cap-messed hair and the strange surroundings of a hospital that hadn't the slightest clue that, only so many rooms over, brains were being opened bringing them back to stark reality. It was odd to live in a world where both pulsating life and lime Jello were found in the same building.

And when he couldn't lead anymore, she pulled him toward an empty hospital room, hid behind the door, and tugged him close to her, his arms instinctively wrapping around her body, and after a stunned moment, he felt her heavy breathing and softened against her, tried to soothe his palm against her back while she cried. Lioness tears, magnificent tears, he knew these cries well, for even though she wasn't one to let her vulnerability be shown often, she only cried after being strong, after being forced into the most unfathomable events and feeling the weight of her fears for so long. Or, rather, that was how he knew her to cry, but since he'd regained his right to vote, he'd felt a shift in her, a feeling that their intimacy went deeper than it had before. At first, she would come home agitated only to be caught crying in their bathroom in the small hours of the morning, but gradually, she would start letting herself go at dinner or talking everything through with him on the couch, some movie they weren't watching muted on the television.

Whenever the insomnia overtook him nowadays, he tended toward one topic: the answers he would give if only she would ask. Or, rather, if only _he_  would ask, and then, she would, of course, feel naturally prompted, and the conversation would continue with ease because, of course, he'd already gone over his answers, had thought through each one with depth and intelligence so that he would say what he really wanted to say. As he held her in the hospital room, her breaths evening out but her sobs still shaking her body every few moments, he brought one imagining back.

_We're looking out the window in our bedroom, and there's snow on the ground, it's snowing, it's late in the evening, and she's not going to work tomorrow. Or maybe it's a Saturday night, and she doesn't have to work anyway, but regardlessly, the snow means we aren't leaving the house, and it's comforting. Or, if we leave the house, it's to get a Christmas tree from the woods, but that's actually a dumb idea because it'll be covered in snow, so we'll do that another time. Regardlessly, it's December, and we're looking out the window, and snow is falling. It's silent, save for the radiator and her breaths that fog the glass. She smells like the night cream she only uses when her skin gets dry in the winter. She's wearing the ring._

_"Mulder?" she asks._

_I hum a response, my side flush with hers._

_"I know I hinted at it," she gives in that casual way she tries to pass off; whenever she speaks with such a tone, she's always feeling more vulnerable than she wants to perceive herself as being, "but what made you really decide to ask?"_

_And, of course, because I planned this, I say, "The dead family of four."_

_She furrows her brow as if we ever had a proper, picket-fenced partnership and asks, "What?"_

_"In October, the family of four died in your emergency room," I say. "You and almost everyone else working tried to save them but couldn't. The children held on longest, though, and you were the last one to give up on them. As soon as you stepped away, they called those last deaths."_

_Uncomfortably, she stares at the snow, gives, "I'm well aware."_

_"You came home, and I was making dinner, and you dropped your purse down and hung up your keys, and I went to ask how work was, but you just walked into the kitchen, boots dragging mud across the carpets, and wrapped your arms around me. Then, you started crying. That's when I knew."_

_"I still don't understand," she says because this is my imagining, and, in my imaginings, she actually wants me to explain every excruciating detail, even the ones about monsters._

_"You didn't hold back," I say, "and you stopped holding back, and you wanted me there. You were open to wanting me there. I could make you feel better, and you were willing to ask that of me. There wasn't any fear, any miscommunication, any fronting. It was just us, nothing held back. That's how I knew."_

Easing herself away from his arms, she looked up at him, sweat on her brow and coating her underarms, eyes bloodshot and tired with a full work day plus a lengthy surgery. His knees ached just with standing, and he could tell hers did to, the way she swayed telling her off, but for a deep moment, all he could do was look, map the lines around her mouth, count fading freckles and dry patches of winter skin. Then, he watched as her lips turned into a smile, as she forced a laugh, for it was strange to be in a world where people lived and died and did everything in between, and he laughed too, and outside, there could be people dying, or there could be people getting coffee, or there could be dogs and cats begging for food whenever they saw an opportunity, or there could be early snow, silent but life-altering, a scalpel to the brain, no pain because there are no pain receptors there. Sometimes, people lived, and sometimes, they didn't, and sometimes, they found themselves going from one extreme to the other, godlike choices being offered to grieving parents, four people dying in an emergency room and making him realize that he needed to ask her.

Sometimes, he would take her to a fancy restaurant and ask her to marry him in a cinematic but quiet display, enough to get a round of applause from the diners and a free bottle of champagne from the chef but not enough to lose the intimacy. Sometimes, she would overthrow those plans and ask him to observe brain surgery with her instead.

"Sushi?" she managed, her throat dry, her lips chapped.

Real life tended to be better than his imaginings.


End file.
